Some data storage systems include complex arrangements of storage disk arrays, configuration management interfaces, and storage processors. A system administrator faces many choices in making adjustments to the configuration of a data storage system in response to changing conditions, many of them resulting in suboptimal performance. Along these lines, the system administrator may seek advice with regard to provisioning additional storage when the performance of a storage processor falls below expectation when the storage processor is managing a sufficiently heavy disk I/O operation load within a file system while running certain applications.
In some circumstances, the system administrator is unable to share data from applications with those whom the administrator would seek for configuration advice, the advisor. Conventional approaches to optimizing configurations for data storage systems in such circumstances involve using synthetic data generation to simulate application workload properties when application data is not available. For example, the advisor may use her knowledge of her customers to determine a schedule for applying a load on a file system for storage hardware of a particular configuration. When the hardware is able to continuously handle this load for at least some amount of time, then the configuration is acceptable for the particular customer running the application for which the synthetic I/O operation load data was generated.